The Women’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection is the product of a Situationist dérive: the playful practice of crossing and exploring urban spaces. The dérive adopts an unconventional strategy of geographical displacement punctuated by random and indeterminate movements. Paths take shape according to the stimuli of the city. These paths push toward the unknown and contemplate the possibility of getting lost as an opportunity for learning and discovery.
Neverthless, the dérive does not exclusively celebrate losing oneself. It is configured above all as a clue-based technique for understanding the contemporary: an exploratory process of collecting and interpreting signs, suggestions, vital traces, emotional tonalities, and symbolic worlds.
These hints gather on the collection’s clothes to form eclectic palimpsests rich with heterogeneous references. The clothes are transformed into psycho-geographic maps capable of recording the urban unconscious: maps that embroider the world within a discourse of affectionate intimacy. The reference is to the Carte de Tendre, published in 1654 by Madeleine de Scudéry: a map of tenderness, a moving topography of desire. In fact each object in the collection is offered up as a small atlas of emotions, a treasure chest of aesthetic references, a sentimental cartography in which patterns, extraordinary craftsmanship, and rarefied materials are interwoven.
The exploration of the world results in a tender mapping in which the aesthetic dimension is deeply imbued with the political. Indeed De Scudéry’s map celebrated a rebellion against conventions: a revolt based on the recognition of women’s inner world. “In this respect, the power of her vision can be inspiring even today, not only because her discourse contains a political affirmation of desire, but because it permits us to reposition sentiments on our own map, and therefore to alter the cartographies we use to navigate our world.” (G. Bruno)
Photos/Text: Gucci
FASHION AVENUE NEWS MAGAZINE 